For over six years I have been hunting for a Linux distro that would allow me to replace my Windows installation. I've tried many versions of RedHat and Mandrake, and more recently, Gnoppix, Kanotix, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Knoppix. In my evaluations, I would start with high hopes that the latest and greatest distro would install smoothly, support my hardware, and create a genuinely usable system, but none of them really worked--until now. I recently came across the first distro that satisfied all my requirements: Ubuntu.

All I can say about Ubuntu is that it looks nice. I wouldn't however call it easy to use or just working. The non-default install can be frightening for a newbie (and with the default you have to wipe your entire HD). It didn't recognize my Windows partitions, so I had to add them manually. It didn't have a driver for my Lucent winmodem; I compiled the driver from source, but couldn't get it to work properly (it wouldn't load automatically, had to make "sudo ./autoload" in the src directory before connecting). Wvdial/pppd permissions weren't setup for non-root dialing, had to do it manually. Totem doesn't play DVD out of the box... So Ubuntu leaves much to be desired in the ease-of-use department. A second, non-US .iso with all necessary codecs, plugins, and drivers hosted somewhere in Europe would be one step in the right direction.